COOL, LCG conditions database for the LHC experiments: Development and deployment status

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, designed to collide opposing beams of protons or lead ions, started its operations in September 2008 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. To process and analyze the huge amounts of data generated by the four experiments installed at different collision points along the LHC ring, a large distributed computing infrastructure has been set up, the LHC Computing Grid (LCG). The bulk of this data, referred to as ‘event data’, will record the signals left in the sub-detectors of the four LHC experiments by the passage of the particles generated in the collision of the LHC beams. A different set of data, referred to as ‘conditions data’ and needed for the analysis of event data, will record the experimental conditions at the time the event data were collected, such as the measured temperatures or the calculated calibration factors for the several sub-detectors of each LHC experiment. The COOL project provides common software components and tools for the handling of the conditions data of the LHC experiments. It is part of the LCG Persistency Framework (PF), a broader project set up within the context of the LCG Application Area (AA) to devise common persistency solutions for the LHC experiments. COOL software development is the result of the collaboration between the CERN IT Department and ATLAS and LHCb, the two experiments that have chosen it as the basis of their conditions database infrastructure. COOL supports conditions data persistency using several relational technologies (Oracle, MySQL, SQLite and FroNTier), based on the CORAL Common Relational Abstraction Layer. For both experiments, Oracle is the backend used for the deployment of COOL database services at Tier0 and Tier1 sites of the LHC Computing Grid. While the development of new software functionalities is being frozen as LHC operations are ramping up, the main focus for the project in 2008 has shifted to performance optimization for data insertion and retrieval and to the deployment and test of Oracle database services for COOL. In this presentation, we will review the status and plans of both software development and COOL database service deployment at the time of the NSS conference, a few weeks after the start-up of the LHC.